This week’s strange. Through an amusing coincidence I am going to be teaching Monday, Tuesday and then that’s it. Wednesday is an NQT conference, Thursday is the year 10 parents evening and on Friday it’s an INSET day.

My god, what a haul of goodies we managed today! It was like someone knew we were going and got out the goodies ready for us. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a second XBox running XBMC in my bedroom, but never thought it worth the £40-odd for a second hand XBox.

Well… how does £10 grab you? No? Well after taking advantage of our technical knowledge and bamboozling the seller we got it for £8. People’s brains fuse if you start prodding their stuff and saying “ahh the labels are intact, it’s not been opened. This one would be ideal”. It also helps if you have a female counterpart

The XBox even works. I’ve had to order a video cable from eBay, and a Modchip is now in the post too. Looks like I’ll be spending a fun hour with my soldering iron again soon. I get to go cross-eyed soldering SMD components again.

I also bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for 20 quid, including two controllers and a light gun. The light gun won’t work on my TV, but this is OK since the NES itself doesn’t seem to work either. It flashes the power light at me. Yes, this means the cart isn’t connecting properly and I need to repair the contacts. I’ve added that to my list. I’ll swap the cartridge slot from a working NES just to make sure the main circuit board isn’t faulty though.

I then bought a couple of books (a Red Dwarf book and a William Gibson), a cheeseburger and managed to block the toilets. Amy bought several of those TV games units that contain an FPGA emulation of an old console and its ROMs. She’s got a Sega Megadrive one that has Sonic the Hedgehog, Columns and other games, and a bizarre Tetris game.

We very nearly bought an Amstrad PCW1512 word processor, but having no money and no desire to carry it across the field stopped us. We also successfully resisted buying another Sega Megadrive, but David did buy a Sega Saturn. There were also many Gameboys for sale and those amusingly illegal “52-in-1″ games carts.

We will return another day looking for games and junk. I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house too

As is usual for some weekends, I’m at Amy’s again. I also took Dave, another Llamasoftie, along too as he had some retro hardware to give Amy. She’s now got a colour monitor for her Amstrad and while cooking tea had a fun bit of gaming in the kitchen with the Amstrad set up next to the cooker.

Tea was made to the squealing tune of Manic Miner scraping its way off tape, Commando and KickStart 2. All amusing games that after spending five minutes loading, we were going to get our money’s worth. If a game takes [i]x[/i] minutes to load, you have to play it for at least that much time - a hard task when some of these old games are just utter rubbish. We found some space shooter that was truly awful, both technically and as a shooter game. They really did peddle some gash back then.

We’re off to the giant Hemswell car boot again, but earlier in the hope of scoring some bargains.

Inspired by a set of photos on nuxx.net of lightsticks that were cut open and tipped down a toilet (why? well… they glow, what other reasons do you need?) I decided I had to have a go. While making a cup of tea I discovered a glowing drinks stirrer and set about it with a pair of scissors.

My photos, while interesting, don’t quite have the alien glow of c0nsumer’s. I think I’ll try again with some proper glo-sticks. Mine look like luminescent creatures in some underwater cave, or possibly a Predator with severe haemorrhoids

All photos shot with my Canon A85 camera and a 15 second exposure. My bathroom now has a pretty sparkling effect after I accidentally flicked some glo-juice up the walls and onto the floor.

(or Airplane if you’re from the other side of the sloshy wet stuff)

http://www.sonnyradio.com/airfactory.htm

What do you do when the Japanese are looking for things to drop bombs on, and you need to keep your top secret aircraft plant that bit more top secret? Easy… cover the whole lot in camouflage netting and make it look like harmelss residential buildings, fields and trees.

Yes, cover the whole thing - buildings, carparks, the runway… the lot, with added creativity bonuses for allowing some buildings to poke out the netting as though they were houses.

This rates up there with the inflatable planes and tanks used in World War 2.

I’ve just discovered the computer in my car has trouble working out how many miles it can go before running out of fuel if the tank is nearly empty. For the past two days I’ve been driving around with the orange warning light on, indicating I really should fill up with petrol or face the consequences of my car stopping. The computer in my car claimed I had 60 miles left so, being me and slightly inquisitive, I ignored it.

The miles left seemed to drop to 40 and then stay around there for a long time. Enough for me to drive to and from work twice (which, conveniently, is approximately 40 miles! - I used to do that in a day before). As I was coming home, passing one of the many petrol stations on my route the computer in my car decided “nope, that’s your lot… you have —– miles left” and stopped telling me how far I could go.

I must have rolled into the petrol station with about a teacup of petrol left. There can’t have been more than a small amount sloshing around in the bottom of the petrol tank, just enough to make the fuel gauge register.

It’s very convenient living two minutes (on foot) away from a petrol station, even if it does want to charge 117.9p/litre.

Well, I’ve just finished madly sorting out my Year 10 reports and they’re now in the library being bound, ready for posting. The year 10s start two weeks of work experience after next week, but due to various things happening next week I’ve just finished my final year 10 classes of this school year.

In fact, next week I only have Monday as a proper, normal day. On Tuesday the first two periods are being used for careers talks. On Wednesday I am at an NQT conference all day, Thursday is the year 10 parents day and Friday is an INSET day.

This is very good

The more astute of you may have noticed that the usual front page of my website has changed. In a small fit of realisation when leaving the house this morning I realised the main thing on my website is this - my diary.

And so my diary is now the main page of my website thanks to a bit of crafty .htaccess magic:

RewriteEngine on                                                                
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} !^$                                           
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} openid.mode=authorize                               
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !auth=                                              
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} =GET                                              
RewriteRule (.*) %{REQUEST_URI}?%{QUERY_STRING}&auth=%{HTTP:Authorization} [L]  
                                                                                                     
Redirect 301 /index.php http://www.piku.org.uk/diary/

The other stuff is still here, nothing has changed except one line in my htaccess file so you get redirected here. I’m going to do something to my website during the summer holidays. I’ve got some content to add and a few design changes I want to make. For now it’s better if you look at my diary since it gets updated several times a week.

This morning I noticed one of my pet mice had died. The poor thing was lying in its enclosure in a distinctive ‘I am dead’ way. It’s now in the garden helping my plants grow.

Dead mice are weird. They go all stiff and hard and sort of deflate, moulding to whatever they’re lying on. Having long tails is a definite advantage too.

My other mouse is happily running around its wheel being very much alive.

Once again it was another Alternative Curriculum Day. My form, being the kids they are mostly decided today wasn’t worth turning up for, with there being a whopping five in morning registration, then a slightly more fuller (but still poor) seven in the afternoon.

I spent all day doing ‘marketing’ which involved the students making a product out of glo-sticks and marketing them.

Now, it sounds a great idea, the kids have to come up with a product and then market it, and then pitch their idea to the whole class, with the rest of the class deciding on which is the best. The problem is when you combine kids, scissors and glo-sticks.

Yep, we had glo-stick juice up the walls and in someone’s mouth. The best we can say is that the stuff is non-toxic and she won’t be chewing them again.